Roland laughed, “This is a toilet, and will also be your construction project of the highest priority.”
“A toilet?” Karl thought about it, “Your Highness, where do you plan to build them? For this, you already have chamber pots placed in your castle, and your attendants are responsible for cleaning them on a regular basis. Most of the villagers don’t even use them, instead, they are doing it directly outside of their houses,” Karl explained. “The same is also true for the serfs, which can directly discharge their filth into the Shishui River, and the river will then take their filth away.”
So, that was the strong smell I smelled today at the dock, Roland shook his head, trying to erase these unpleasing thoughts, “If that is the case, we need to change this bad habit as soon as possible.”
“Uh… bad habit?” Karl still didn’t seem to understand what the Prince’s meaning.
For a commoner who was accustomed to urinating at any place, it was naturally hard for them to understand, how beautiful a casual stroll could be without having to fear stepping on a landmine, Roland criticized privately. “Anyway, you only have to follow these sketches, I have already roughly marked their size, so you only have to use this distance. Within the vicinity of the wooden shed district, you should build at least four toilets, always two side by side. In addition, the wall in the middle of the ditch should be built out of brick, while the outside walls and the roof have to be built out of wood, like this you can save a lot of cement.”
“Your Highness, you want to build them side by side… that…,” said Karl slowly, evidently, he thought that talking about this dirty theme with His Highness was clearly degrading the royalty’s dignity. “But what should we do when they don’t use them?”
“I will issue orders which they will have to follow. You just have to build them; I will take care of the rest.”
“Alright if that’s the case,” Karl said, nodding his head. “There is another matter I want to discuss with you, Your Royal Highness.
“You may speak.”
“The mason’s guild was forced to disband and now there are many people like me, who all chose to leave King’s City. I would like to write a few letters to those masons who already know where I went and try to recruit them to Border Town. They all have their own area of specialization, for example, for the furnace, Lesya would be the best at it. However, Your Highness I do not know… ”
“That’s no problem at all,” Roland said immediately. ” I will recruit all the masons you’re able to attract, and they will be paid according to their experience and skills, and they will also have the possibility to enter the town’s hall.”
“Thank you for your generosity,” Karl bowed once more then he left.
When the mason had stepped out of the hall, Roland began to write down his plan for the managing the serfs and how he wanted to disband the slavery system.
Border Town’s population had already started to rapidly increase with no end in sight, but as long as they had to dependent on importing food, the town would be in jeopardy if a natural disaster was to occur or the road to the other cities was cut off. Therefore, in addition to increasing and developing industry, development in the area of agriculture was an even higher priority. Border Town had to achieve the level of self-sufficiency as soon as possible.
The Prince believed that as soon as he was able to implement his ideas, the serfs could be turned into farmers, and combined with Leaves’ improved seeds, the area around the Shishui River would soon become a golden wheat ocean.
Regarding the high priority of the toilet, it also had to do with the development of the agriculture – with enough people, land and seeds, the last thing he still needed was the right kind of fertilizer.
Roland certainly knew how troublesome it was to produce fertilizer out of human and animals’ excrements, they had to regularly clean the storage pond, but they also had to rely on human manure, in the end, it was clearly inconvenient. But for now he didn’t have any clue of how to produce it on industrial level, so for the present, he had to rely on this pure natural and organic fertilizer – at least human-animal manure had already been used for a long time, even during the twentieth century some of the rural areas were still using this traditional fertilization.
Many people only had very little knowledge about fertilizer, the vast majority of them just thought that a stool was a dirty thing, and that they should never believe that besides of spreading nausea it could ever have any useful effects. Thus, to cultivate the fields each year, the farmers were still using the three-rotation system. For it a piece of arable land would be divided into three parts, taking turns for spring sowing, sowing in autumn and resting phase, all this was done to avoid the depletion of soil fertility due to constant use.